Book Review: 'The Mountain' by Ed Viesturs

Book Review: 'The Mountain' by Ed Viesturs

For professionals, Everest is still a peril—even more so for amateurs with summit lust.

By Gregory Crouch

Mount Everest isn't the most beautiful mountain on earth, or the hardest to climb, but it is the highest, and that singular fact has made it a locus of literary and adventurous obsession for nearly a century. About the world's tallest peak, Ed Viesturs, the author of "The Mountain: My Time on Everest," speaks with uncommon authority. He is America's most famous mountaineer, the first American to climb all the world's 14 mountains higher than 8,000 meters. Among his 31 Himalayan expeditions, he has made 11 to the Big E. Mr. Viesturs launched his initial Everest sortie in 1987 but didn't reach the summit until his third try, in 1990, as a cog in a gigantic multinational "peace" expedition of Soviet, Chinese and American climbers. Over the next 19 years, he successfully climbed the mountain six more times.

During that time, Everest changed enormously, attracting guide services with dozens—then hundreds—of clients, seasonally booming into a gypsy-fair base camp with overpopulation and waste-disposal problems. It became the subject of wild media interest following Jon Krakauer's best seller "Into Thin Air," which details a 1996 Everest tragedy in which bad judgment, summit lust and a surprise storm conspired to kill eight people. This past season, photos circulated showing a conga line of 150 suitors plodding toward the summit, nose-to-bum, and a fight broke out between Sherpas and Western climbers.

In a generation, Everest had flashed to the third and final stage that dooms every mountain, in the classic 1895 observation of alpine pioneer A.F. Mummery: "An inaccessible peak—The most difficult ascent in the Alps—An easy day for a lady."

Inspired to salvage Everest's tattered reputation, Mr. Viesturs takes up his pen with twofold purpose, hoping "to counter the sordid caricature of Everest as a circus for dilettantes" and to celebrate the mountain's rich history. With David Roberts, one of America's finest mountain writers, Mr. Viesturs has crafted a breezy tour through his many Everest ascents, punctuated by accounts of "some of the most visionary deeds in the long chronicle of mountaineering." Armchair adventurers will rip through this addition to the Everest canon, and for anyone not intimate with Everest's adventurous history, "The Mountain" marks a fine beginning.

Mr. Viesturs recounts the stories of the early British explorers, among them George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, who disappeared mysteriously near the summit in 1924. In the 1930s, Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman practiced a "fast and light" ethic—planning their forays on envelopes. Via the mountain's South Col, a Swiss expedition failed 800 feet short of the top in 1952, greasing the skids for Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's success the following year, "which some wit later called . . . 'the last great day of the British Empire.' "

All those Everest adventures were grueling. Others were outright torture. Americans Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld pioneered Everest's West Ridge in 1963 by scaling above the possibility of retreat. They only succeeded—and survived—by climbing over the summit, enduring a frigid open bivouac at 28,000 feet and continuing down to the South Col, a feat that British Himalayan great Doug Scott considers "in terms of sheer commitment," to be "the finest climb ever done on Everest."

Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler romped up the hill without supplemental oxygen in 1978, and for good measure, two years later, Mr. Messner completed a monsoon-season solo on the north side, also done without sucking O. In 1980, a Polish expedition accomplished Everest's first and, to date, only winter ascent, a mind-boggling sufferfest. And even some aficionados may not be familiar with the gobsmacking deeds of Swiss alpinists Jean Troillet and Erhard Loretan, who, using light and fast alpine tactics, climbed and descended Everest via a difficult route in just 43 hours, an achievement that Mr. Viesturs regards with "awe."

As he leads us along, Mr. Viesturs shares much process but little grandeur—"The Mountain" is surprisingly devoid of physical descriptions of the Himalayan landscape and of Everest itself. His own tales are good, although not as riveting as the stories poached from history—which is understandable, considering that throughout his career Mr. Viesturs has done a remarkable job of avoiding "epics." He distills lessons from his climbs, most of which boil down to him trusting his gut instincts and not being swayed by summit lust or the opinions of others. Perhaps news to flatland audiences, these are old saws parroted by all alpinists—even those no longer on the green side of the grass.

The author has certainly helped quite a number of other people down from their own near-disasters, including a partner who couldn't get enough air past a mucus buildup in his throat that no amount of coughing could dislodge. Practically choking for 48 hours as he staggered down the mountain with Mr. Viesturs's aid, the poor guy barely survived, and when he finally coughed out the mucus plug and got an unimpeded lungful of air, the plug sat on the snow "slimy green, bloody, and the size of a half dollar."

Mr. Viesturs was also on Everest during that ill-fated 1996 season and shares his musing on the disaster—surely history's most chewed-over climbing tragedy. He and David Breashears were making an IMAX movie, and they had a grandstand view of the unfolding fiasco before they put their film project aside to help survivors descend. Both Scott Fischer and Rob Hall, the two lost guides, were friends and former partners, and when Mr. Viesturs reached the Hillary Step the following year, he found another dead climber "hanging head down, one foot tangled in the fixed ropes." Mr. Viesturs and his partners "cut him loose . . . and watched as his body plunged down the south face."

It is indeed a cold world up there, but as Mr. Viesturs rightly points out: "It's literally impossible to carry a body down a mountain from 28,700 feet. And there are worse places to lie for eternity than on the slopes of Everest."

—Mr. Crouch is the author, most recently, of "China's Wings."

A version of this article appeared October 4, 2013, on page C15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: An Easy Day for a Lady.